Dr. Andrew Herscher, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

Thursday, March 27, 2025, 4:45-6:00pm, GSH G22

“Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan”

In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” Four days after the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed, the First College of Michigania was founded to claim the land that the Anishinaabeg had just granted. Four years later, the newly-chartered University of Michigan would claim this land. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers.  Professor Herscher’s talk reorients the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. The talk offers an opportunity to rethink the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US.